Telegram’s founder, Russia-born Pavel Durov, was arrested at Paris airport on suspicion of illegal activity related to the messaging app and is due to appear in a French court soon.
Sources told AFP the French-Russian tech billionaire was due to appear in court after being detained by police at Le Bourget airport. French investigators had issued a warrant for Durov’s arrest as part of an investigation into allegations of fraud, drug trafficking, organized crime, promoting terrorism and cyberbullying.
Durov, who is accused of failing to take measures to curb criminal use of his platform, was stopped as he arrived in Paris from Baku on a private jet on Saturday night. “We’ve had enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one of the investigators, who expressed surprise that Durov had flown to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.
His detention was extended beyond Sunday night by the investigating judge in charge of the case, a source close to the investigation said, AFP reported.
In a statement on Sunday night, Telegram said: “Telegram complies with EU law, including the Digital Services Act, and our moderation is within industry standards and is constantly improving.”
“Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently to Europe. It is absurd to claim that the platform or its owners are responsible for the misuse of it. We await a speedy resolution of this situation.”
Russian officials have accused France of “refusing to cooperate.” The Russian embassy in Paris has requested a meeting with Durov and said France has so far “avoided involvement” in the situation.
Durov left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with Kremlin demands to shut down opposition groups on VK, the social network he founded at age 22. He left VK after a dispute with its Kremlin-linked owners to focus on Telegram, an app he founded with his brother Nikolai in 2013.
Initially, Telegram was similar to other messaging apps, but has since morphed into a social network in its own right: In addition to one-to-one communication, users can join groups of up to 200,000 people and create broadcast “channels” that other users can follow and leave comments on.
With 950 million monthly active users, Telegram has become a major source of information (and disinformation) about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Durov, who lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds French and UAE nationality, recently said he tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before choosing Dubai, praising the city’s business environment and “neutrality.”
In the UAE, Telegram has faced little pressure to moderate content at a time when Western governments have tried to crack down on hate speech, disinformation, the sharing of child abuse imagery and other illegal content.
Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and allows users to create channels to spread information to their followers. The app, especially popular in the former Soviet Union, is widely used by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his aides, as well as politicians across Ukraine, to disseminate information about the war. It’s also one of the few places Russians can get unfiltered information about the conflict after the Kremlin tightened media control following the full-scale invasion.
Its supposedly unbreakable encryption has made Telegram a haven for extremists and conspiracy theorists. An investigative reporter for the Central European news site VSquare concluded that Telegram has become “the go-to tool for Russian propaganda, left- and right-wing extremism, and US QAnon and conspiracy theorists” and “an ecosystem for the radicalization of opinion.”
The app was also widely used by far-right activists planning anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland following the stabbing death of three children at a dance studio in Southport last month.
Anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram has become the app of choice for racists and violent extremists, and has become a “refuge for anti-Semitic content” with little moderation or effort to curb extremist content.
Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and now deputy chairman of Russia’s hawkish Security Council, argued that Durov had made a mistake in thinking he would never need to flee Russia and cooperate with foreign security services. “He miscalculated,” Medvedev said. “Now to all our common enemies he is Russian and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.”
Writing for X after his arrest, US right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson described Durov as “a living warning to platform owners who refuse to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intelligence agencies.”
In an interview with Carlson earlier this year, Durov said the app should remain a “neutral platform” rather than a “geopolitical player.”
In the interview, Durov said that pressure from the Russian government while working at VK gave him the idea to launch an encrypted messaging app.
He said users “love the independence” of the Telegram app. “They love their privacy, they love their freedom, and there are a lot of reasons to switch to Telegram,” he told Carlson.
Billionaire social media mogul Elon Musk reposted a clip from the interview, in which Durov praised Musk’s acquisition of X as “a great development.” He tweeted a second time, using the hashtag “FreePavel.” “Liberte! Liberte! Liberte?”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last week dropped his own presidential bid to support Donald Trump, commented on the arrests: “The need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”
